Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Battleship Galaxies - it's Battleship, in Space!
I had vaguely heard of this a couple of years ago when the movie came out (Battleship, In Space!) but was not able to find it in Toys R US or Walmart. Little did I know that, like Risk Legacy, it was only available in the specialty game stores. I then forgot about it until Tom Vassal mentioned it in succession in two lists on The Dice Tower recently.
A quick check on BGG does indeed confirm the cool ships. It looks like they intended to have more expansions but it must not have sold well enough to expand like Heroscape did. Now it was just a matter of finding one.
None of the local game stores had one but I was able to get one online from Snakes & Lattes along with a Lords of Waterdeep. Both games are big and heavy so their summer sale with free shipping helped.
It looks very impressive. The boy seems keen on trying it out so, once we finish some of the renovation chores, we’ll give it a spin.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Two weekends ago we moved most of the furniture out of our room, removed the baseboards and pulled up the carpeting. We then put in laminate flooring over the next two days. On the Saturday we did most of the work and finished up the fiddly parts by the door on the Sunday. We even pulled off the closet doors and put two panels into the closet.
There were a few spots where we kept breaking the joints and needed to step away from it for a while, but otherwise, it went together without too much drama. I’m quite impressed with how simple it is to install the new flooring. Be sure to allow a few extra boxes for joint breakage – but these can sometime be used at the end of rows.
It took a couple of days to finish loading in and sorting the books. The clothes need to be fully sorted. Besides the rest of the closet, which can wait, the transition between the flooring and the vinyl in the hallway needs to be added.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

It amazes me that they will rent the odd, dangerous tools to those who have no idea how to use them – like chainsaws and jackhammers. Both of these have the chance to do a lot of damage to person and property in a short amount of time.
That being said, we rented a jackhammer last Saturday to break up the stone steps in the back yard. Truly, the internet was right, it was quite simple to use. It made surprisingly short work of the stairs in the 6 hours that we used it. It could have probably done more but it was quite hot and humid that day (felt like 37 degrees Celsius) and the jackhammer got quite heavy at the end. If the kids had been better about moving away the broken pieces we could have seen what was left a bit better.
The kids both tried it, but spent the afternoon tearing down the old shed. Even our neighbor came over to have a try - he used to use one years ago. We didn't get the concrete down to tiny rocks but did I break up as much as I could. There will still be a bit more needed to be done to clear it all away. We joke that the boy can spend the rest of the summer breaking big rocks into little rocks.
The wife has decided to use the medium pieces to edge her garden, and is currently thinking of putting the rest of the rocks under the front deck. Both ideas sound good as it means that we don't have to make a trip to cart away the pieces.